SOURCE: “The Poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Critical Essays by Peter Ure, Liverpool University Press, 1974, pp. 237-47.

In the following essay, Ure provides an overview of Raleigh's court poetry.

When Sir Walter Ralegh paid a visit to Edmund Spenser in the autumn of 1589, a few months after Spenser had acquired his castle and estate near Cork, he was a man who had already created his own legend. He was perhaps the most brilliant figure at the brilliant court, hated and courted for his pride and power, already a sea captain, an empire-builder, and an Irish landowner. Spenser has left us an idealized account of their poetical intercourse in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. They read each other's poems. Spenser reports that the poem which Ralegh had to offer was

                                                  a lamentable lay, Of great unkindnesse, and of usage hard, Of Cynthia the Ladie...